How I Illustrated a Book in Only a Month

​Last December, just as I wrapped up work on the first children’s book I illustrated for another author, Gardenland: The Peas’ and Carrots’ Party Shake-Up, I was contacted by someone who wanted me to illustrate his children’s book. How exciting! This new author was the community & media relations manager of the Visalia Rawhide minor league baseball team, and he spotted my profile on The Society of Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). He asked me to illustrate a book he had written called Tipper Takes the Mound, which told the story of how Tipper the Bull, the real-life current mascot, was trained to pitch at his first game as the mascot. 

---

However, there was a catch: since the book needed to be published before the start of baseball season, I had until January 31st to finish all fourteen illustrations, plus the front cover—just over a month. Gardenland was a year-long project with thirty-two pages, so knowing I had to do this again in a tiny fraction of that time sounded impossible. Yet as a relatively new illustrator who’s currently building rapport with authors, I needed to prove that I could meet client expectations without sacrificing quality.
​
I met with the author over Zoom shortly after he first contacted me; one meeting was all it took to lock in the essentials to make sure our January 31st deadline was met. Already off to a great start! Unlike Gardenland, which included 12 characters with concept art, storyboards, a logo, font tests, endpaper art, and multiple rounds of revisions, the Rawhide already had a graphic designer handling text and book layout. That meant I only had to worry about character concept art and a single round of illustration revisions.

The concept art phase was much simpler than it had been on Gardenland, as instead of designing twelve characters, here I only needed three: Tipper the Bull, Chatter the Squirrel (the Rawhide’s former mascot), and the Rawhide manager. Since these characters and their world had to remain faithful to their real-life counterparts, the author sent me reference photos of the current mascot, the old mascot, and Valley Strong Ballpark- the Rawhide’s official baseball field. With Tipper, I had to keep as close as possible to his art in the team merch while still adapting him to my art style. With Chatter, his old mascot costume was rather bland, so I was given creative freedom for his design. I decided to lean into the wise old mentor who embraces an aging man aesthetic with glasses, baggy eyes, a gut-belly, chubby rodent cheeks, and an old baseball bat he uses as a cane. After a few minor tweaks from the author’s feedback, the designs were finalized before Christmas Eve.

I thus started the illustrations before the new year, and in that time tackled my lack of knowledge about baseball. My entire firsthand experience amounted to just three years of Little League from kindergarten to second grade. Not much time to research the sport! To quickly find a personal connection with this topic I knew so little about, I had to reference something I already loved: movies. Many baseball movies focus on the sport as a living relic of America’s history and future, wrapped up in hope and nostalgia. Think Field of Dreams, The Sandlot, and A League of Their Own. The baseball signed by Babe Ruth in The Sandlot is essentially a sacred artifact, so I filled Tipper’s world with similar memorabilia, like a signed home plate hung on the wall in Tipper’s barn. Films like A League of Their Own and 42 also use baseball as a lens for American progress, and Tipper Takes the Mound carries a similar spirit by Chatter handing the mascot title to Tipper as the team changes its name. To communicate this idea without saying a word, I symbolically portrayed it on the page of Chatter’s kitchen by putting an old gray Oaks baseball cap on a table beside a new red Rawhide cap.

Those moments of quiet visual storytelling are among my favorite parts of illustration, as they help bring to life the true meaning of the author’s story. My background in film and cinematography likewise aided me more in telling the author’s story by establishing the mood through cinematic lighting tricks. Perhaps my favorite use of this was the light radiating from behind Chatter as he makes his entrance to restore confidence in a nervous Tipper inside a heavily shaded barn.

Even while the tight deadline forced me to prioritize the more important storytelling elements in my work, I still made sure to have fun with my signature doses of funny details like in Gardenland. Giving Tipper my signature creative touch though was a bit different, such as an Abbot & Costello reference on a book Tipper was reading written by “Dr. Hu” (Who’s on first!) and red boxy text slapped onto certain illustrations with sound effects to add energy. One illustration enabled me to stretch my character design skills by including fifteen other bulls in the page where Tipper is chosen by Chatter to be the new mascot. Each bull has a different fur pattern, different clothes, and a different reaction to seeing Tipper get chosen over themselves. I could’ve easily drawn only Tipper and Chatter in that scene and called it a day, but I wanted to create something that would make people stop, look, and smile.

The coloring and shading process had to be a deliberate departure from my previous work. While Gardenland enabled me to go lush and colorful with a wet blender tool in Photoshop, with Tipper, I lacked the luxury of extra time. I decided to limit the color palette throughout the book to only three—red, gray, and tan—the colors on Tipper the Bull’s official team artwork, plus some green to the salads Tipper eats at the author’s request. Extra pops of green and blue were put on the cover as well to make a positive first impression. For shading, I swapped the wet blender for solid lines since it was quicker yet still gave the illustrations a strong amount of depth. Together, these constraints pushed me to find cleaner, smarter solutions that I can now carry into future projects. That includes drawing shadows, using reference pictures, finding inspiration from outside sources, guiding the reader’s eye with color, and more.

The greatest challenge of the project was recreating Valley Strong Ballpark, since the real thing is packed with fine details like tents, lights, and signage that had to be simplified just enough so the iconic field would still be recognizable. The buildings surrounding the real Valley Strong Ballpark though I did not recreate, as that would’ve taken too long, and it was better to instead surrounded the field with a forest of trees and a parking lot. Most of the illustrations on a good day took a single eight-hour workday to complete, but the Valley Strong Ballpark pages each took a few days to get done right.

From late February until the book’s official launch in April, the author toured many local schools alongside Tipper to do live readings of the book, with autographed copies gifted to the schools. Tipper Takes the Mound is now available at Visalia Rawhide’s team store, and in the local Visalia bookstore, The Book Nook. The finished product turned out far better than I imagined! The author told me that he and the others down at Visalia had nothing but great things to say about working with me. This goes to show that tight deadlines don’t have to mean compromised quality; they just mean you must be smart, flexible, and creative while cutting corners. When done properly, those cut corners can mean greater quality products and professional personal growth.

---

Trevor Pacelli is a young adult on the autism spectrum as well as the author of What Movies Can Teach Us About Disabilities, What Movies Can Teach Us About Bullying, Summer of the Fruit Virus and the illustrator of The Kindergarten Adventures of Amazing Grace: What in the World is Autism?, Gardenland: The Peas' and Carrots' Party Shake-Up, Tipper Takes the Mound, and the author/illustrator of Amazing Grace Goes to the Zoo.
​